Happy Thanksgiving (yesterday, but it’d be today for the folks back home in the USA.) So after last night’s late night with the crew, we thought waking up at 5:50 am would make for a rough early morning SCUBA dive. After dragging ourselves out of bed and brushing our teeth, we set off for the sun deck for our morning dive briefing. Barely half of the crew was awake to assist, but it was still a manageable size diving the morning dive. After the dive briefing and suiting up in our wetsuits, we eagerly stepped off the back diving deck at [View Full Entry]

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We booked our dive trip with Deep Sea Divers Den based on recommendations made by Frank's dive master, Terry, and also because they hold a 5-star PADI rating. As we found out late in our planning process, the best way to experience the Great Barrier Reef is to plan "liveaboards" where you go 2-4 hours out to sea and live aboard a large hotel-like vessel that is fully equipped with all the dive gear you might need. The majority of liveaboards range from 2-7 nights, the further you get out to sea, the better the diving. Because we can't dive for [View Full Entry]

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We had an early 5:30a wake-up call today so that we could grab the 6:15a bus to the airport for our 9:00a flight to Sydney. We flew Air New Zealand and, as with Qantas, we found them to have the same great on-board service that we used to have on US flights many moons ago. For breakfast, we had a choice between a hot breakfast of potato-eggs with bacon or the continental breakfast with cereal, yoghurt and fruit. Kip went with the hot breakfast and Frank with continental. We flew on a brand new 767 and each seat had its own [View Full Entry]

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After the weather forecast looked to improve today, we decided to get out of town. We took the AirBus out to the airport - the AirBus runs every 15-minutes from the downtown area of Auckland to the domestic and international terminals at Auckland’s airport. Once we arrived at the airport a short 35 minutes later, we picked up our Daihatsu economy car with manual stick-shift. It was a flashy red car only slightly larger than a SmartCar and we thought that a GPS would prevent us from getting lost. Frank was the one to take on the driving challenge with Kip [View Full Entry]

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So we fell asleep last night to a wet, windy, and rainy Auckland. We woke this morning to that same Auckland so decided to have a low-key laundry day. After dropping off our laundry at a nearby laundry service, we walked around the central business district a bit and the K’Road area. This is a bar area of Auckland complete with some interesting shops. We popped into an army surplus store and wondered how many militias existed in the area as the clientele was interesting. We spoke with some of the locals and got a recommendation for dinner. This proved to [View Full Entry]

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We arrived at Tauranga at 5:45am. No worries, we definitely were not up at the time. Tauranga is NZ's ninth largest city and growing fast. The population is close to 110 thousand and the city has tripled in size in the last 25 years. Due to its sheltered position on the east coast, the city enjoys a warm, dry climate. It's become a popular location to retire to but during the summer months the population swells with vacationers. We descended onto Tauranga around 10:30am and were immediately pleasantly surprised by the beautiful beaches, well kept homes, pine trees and open vistas. [View Full Entry]

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Today we're technically at sea all day as we make our way to White Island Volcano for a two hour stop this evening. White Island is an active volcano situated 48km from the east coast of the North Island in the Bay of Plenty. The island is about 2km in diameter and rises 320m above sea level while the rest of the mountain actually rises 1600m above the seafloor. The volcano had major eruptions in 1981-83, but the last major one took place on July 27, 2000. It left the island blanketed with mud and a new crater was created. The [View Full Entry]

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The result of a compromise between the North and South Islands, Wellington became the capital of NZ in 1865, replacing Auckland that had been the capital since 1841. The city is located on the southern tip of the North Island and is the country's second largest city. Due to it's omnipresent winds, the city is also affectionately known as "Windy Wellington." It was named to honor Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington and victor of the Battle of Waterloo. We arrived in port at 7am but after sleeping in a bit, getting ready and having breakfast, we finally disembarked around [View Full Entry]

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Christchurch is the South Island’s largest city and New Zealand’s second largest city. Once we arrived at the Lyttelton Harbor, we again boarded a shuttle bus that took us downtown. Once downtown we went to the information center to view other options for the day. The information center rented bicycles so we opted to mount our 24-speed bicycles and pedaled around for the day. We chose to start our adventures by pedaling out to the New Brighton Pier. New Brighton is situated on the Pacific Ocean about 7 km outside of town. From there we picked up a bike trail in [View Full Entry]

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We arrived into the Port Chalmers this morning. The port has the typical shipyard containers and stacks of trees prepped from nearby logging operations. Port Chalmers is the closest point to dock for Dunedin. Dunedin is the second largest city on the South Island of New Zealand and the principal city of the region of Otago. It is also New Zealand’s 5th largest city in terms of population. We woke up and went upstairs to the Ocean Café. After eating breakfast, we boarded a shuttle bus into downtown Dunedin. The weather was again a mixture of rain and sunshine with a [View Full Entry]

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